People who have worked with Jeff Zucker, the just-appointed president of CNN, are said to adore him and to be incredibly loyal to him. But in my experience, they all gossip like crazy about him and, while professing love, also try to analyze the kinks, flaws, and circumstances of his character. His reputation, to say the least, precedes him.

On the day of his appointment, I got a call from a powerful entertainment business executive encouraging me to write the "truth" about Zucker. "He is a bad guy," said Mr Big. "He is one of the bad guys." There followed a begrudging acknowledgement of his one success, the Today show, which he produced for 18 years, and then the litany of his failures while running NBC – including the one that will go down in television history: rescheduling and then un-rescheduling Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien.

And yet, in a sense, it is already a success that people in TV feel passionately about Jeff Zucker, rather than the ho-hum they feel about most television executives. Zucker is branded. Zucker is allowed to be Zucker – otherwise you wouldn't have hired him. Every CNN executive since Time Warner bought the company in 1996, for instance, has found himself beached in Atlanta, CNN's legacy hometown. Zucker immediately announced he was having none of this and was basing himself in New York.

He's not someone you trifle with. Zucker survived cancer; at NBC, he scaled some of the greatest bureaucratic heights known to man, giving the shiv to nearly all of his competitors in the process. He's become a media presence in his own right – next to Roger Ailes, he's the most famous television executive of his time, and he's become rich, too.

Still, beyond pure desire to succeed, to win, to have the other guy lose, to grasp and crawl to the top, the obvious follow-on question, the one his enemies demand an answer to, is: just what, exactly, has created this vaunted and fearsome Zucker brand? Has he, after all, done anything, in his quarter-century career in television, that is original or groundbreaking?

"He isn't Steve Jobs," said one of those people who has worked with him, delivering a back-handed compliment if there ever was one. "He isn't the new math. He merely does the obvious to win. He just sells what's popular.

"People's instincts are to dislike someone who just accomplishes what it seems like anyone could do. That's frustrating to others."

This could be reassuring to CNN's entrenched, who, for almost two decades now, have resisted reinvention. Or it could be troubling, because the problems at CNN are also obvious. From an unwatchable morning, to an unwatched daytime, to a minimal performance primetime, CNN lacks any pretense of … well, television. Personalities. Razzle-dazzle. Provocations. Zeitgeist. Single-minded determination to win the time slot.

Here's the joke that went around among old Zucker hands when he got his new job: "CNN is no longer a print organization."

This could be bad for Mark Whitaker, CNN's managing editor and the former editor of Newsweek, and for anybody else who continues to see CNN and its news gathering values and methods as a thing apart from cable television.

Zucker is all television: conventional, professional, bells and whistles television; in the game, almost entirely, to win a ratings war.

One CNN producer came in on the day of Zucker's appointment, took a look at his hour's earnest line-up of stories and said, throwing it out: "Is this really how we want to begin the age of Zucker?"

Here's another backhander from a Zucker minion: "He is intellectually honest about his lack of intellectual curiosity."

Shortly after his appointment, Zucker told a receptive CNN staff, eager to be reassured about keeping its not-Fox identity, how much he believed in journalism. But in truth, his career has hardly involved any. Zucker's lifelong obsession has been day-part and primetime, and how to move that ratings dial.

With a little critical interpretation, that could well be good for CNN, long martyred to its own journalism mythology. In a vicious circle, CNN's ratings are so low than no show can ever get the lead-in necessary to build its own good ratings.

But CNN is also much more than day-part and primetime. CNN is one of the great global information-gathering organizations – most of which it fails to do anything with. Then there is CNN International, the profitable but ignored stepchild run out of Atlanta. Then there is CNN Headline News, now called HLN – what is that? And then there is CNN.com, once the biggest online news site, a credible platform for the future of news, suddenly stalled and seemingly in inexplicable decline.

Fixing this is certainly the opportunity of a television executive's lifetime. Except it isn't television. CNN is an information brand, full of meaning but lacking purpose, trapped in a television world. Freeing it and unlocking its potential will call on skill sets and interests that Zucker doesn't have. He is no information visionary, global thinker, or digital native (hardly even a casual visitor – in true Hollywood fashion, assistants tend to his email).

Still, beyond television programming, what he has consistently demonstrated is an unerring instinct for the power grab. He is an empire builder and self-myth maker (Zucker is famous for his PR Praetorian Guard).

This is why he is so disliked by other empire builders and self myth-makers. And yet, curiously, the one thing that might save CNN – the only thing that might save it – is ambition. Now, in the age of Zucker, it goes from having almost none to getting a megalo-amount of it.